Lockdown measures could be imposed on the U.K. by the World Health Organisation (WHO) during a future pandemic under sweeping new powers, Government ministers fear. The Telegraph has the story.
Member states would be obliged to follow the agency’s instructions when responding to pandemics, including by introducing vaccine passports, border closures and quarantine measures, under a draft update to its regulations.
A new ‘pandemic treaty’ under discussion would also force Britain to spend 5% of its health budget on preparing for another virus outbreak.
Ministers are understood to be alarmed by plans to increase the WHO’s powers enabling its governing body to require countries to hand over the recipe of vaccines, regardless of intellectual property rights, and to counter misinformation.
Conservative MPs have written to ministers to warn of an “ambition evident… for the WHO to transition from an advisory organisation to a controlling international authority”.
In their letter, seen by the Telegraph, they urge the Foreign Office to block powers that “appear to intrude materially into the U.K.’s ability to make its own rules and control its own budgets”.
Responding to the concerns on Thursday, Andrew Mitchell, a Foreign Office minister, told the Telegraph that he would block any law that prevents the U.K. from setting its own health policy.
“The UK is supportive of the pandemic treaty currently being negotiated by national governments, which could speed up the sharing of data on new pandemic threats so we are able to respond quickly in the event of future pandemics,” he said.
“We’re clear that we would never agree to anything that crosses our points of principle on sovereignty or prevents the U.K. from taking decisive action against future pandemics.”
The rule changes have been proposed as part of plans to update the WHO’s International Health Regulations (IHRs) in light of the coronavirus pandemic and establish a new Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.
The treaty was first proposed by world leaders including Boris Johnson in 2021 during the pandemic and was originally designed to improve alert systems, data-sharing and the production of vaccines to “foster an all of government and all of society approach”.
But among 300 proposed amendments to the IHRs are changes to make the WHO’s advice “binding” and introduce a new requirement for countries to recognise it as the global authority on public health measures.
The plan would require member countries to “recognise WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response… and undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations in their international public health response”.
If passed, the change would mean the WHO could enforce border closures, quarantine measures and vaccine passports on all member countries, including the U.K.
A draft of the treaty itself would commit member states to spending 5% of their health budgets, plus a proportion of GDP, to pandemic preparedness.
Six Conservative MPs led by Esther McVey have written to Andrew Mitchell to call for a Commons vote on the draft treaty and regulations before they are signed.
The letter has also been signed by Sir John Redwood, David Davis, Philip Davies, Sir Christopher Chope and Danny Kruger.
Worth reading in full.
UsForThem’s Molly Kingsley has warned in particular about the WHO’s move to become the global authority on ‘misinformation’. She told the Telegraph: “We should all be concerned about the WHO being ordained as an arbiter of pandemic truth, especially given its poor record during the pandemic, such as its claim that Covid was definitively zoonotic in origin and its April 2020 denial of the role of natural immunity in protecting against infection.”
Good to see MPs and the mainstream media finally catching up on the dangers of these changes. Have they only just got round to reading them?
However, they appear to have missed the memo from the WHO making clear that the idea that the new pandemic treaty and regulation changes will “cede power to WHO” is, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “misinformation” and “fake news”.
His reasoning goes that it is countries who will decide the wording and scope of any global agreement on how to tackle the next pandemic, “and countries alone”. Hence there is no ceding of sovereignty.
Erm, but that doesn’t change what the treaty says, which is that any signatories to the treaty are required to follow the instructions of the WHO during a public health emergency. Oh, and also that it’s the WHO that unilaterally decides when something is an emergency, or even just a potential one.
No obvious dangers in that arrangement.
Stop Press: If you can’t get behind the Telegraph’s paywall, the Mail has the same story.
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